I’ll begin with the first message which I received last week from someone I will refer to as D (I actually don’t know her name, haha, so I will use the first letter of her username). It was very straight to the point, asking me whether I was being available on Monday. We sent some messages back and forth, her friends make unexpected plans with her on Monday so we changed it for Tuesday.
The interesting thing about our interaction through the messages was that it felt somewhat transactional. It was as if she was hiring me for a professional service that I was providing and she had just booked an appointment with me.
Our conversation eventually diverted from the formal interaction when I asked about her reasons for being interested in my post and how she envisioned the meeting. I later discovered that the reason for her wanting to treat this as a professional service was because she had a similar arrangement with someone before but they developed feelings for her and so she had to stop.